Formal writing can be enjoyable

 

Teaching can be a romantic business in that you may always seek to clothe what would appear to be a cumbersome task in appealing terms. In this sense, I am an incorrigible romantic.

My focus is yet again writing for a language exam at an advanced level, particularly when the candidates are teenagers and still struggling with formal writing in their native language.

It is not very often that a teacher gets the opportunity to be playful about it but if you look out you might come across texts – newspaper articles, poems or even advertisements –which, if properly used, might provide excellent material for introducing or practising language or register useful in formal writing tasks.

The following was recently published in The Guardian.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oEfOAzprqaMgquQjbfkMMPU9nUT6DmLL/view?usp=sharing                 

It is a facetious exchange between someone versed in bird singing and an imaginary reader who responds to the information provided.

There is enormous potential in the text in various respects: witty repartee, colloquial language and a number of crucial issues to boot – music, birds, drugs, using animals in experiments, sounds during the coronavirus quarantine. So you could challenge your students by asking them to use different expressions from this dialogue to keep a conversation going.

(you don’t say, just think, really, I wonder if …, don’t say)

Now the question is how one could exploit the text in order to elicit more advanced writing. You could ask your students to write a serious article based on this dialogue, which will be published on a science website. This will involve leaving out all irrelevant details (summary skills), reordering the important facts in a way which the reader will find easy to follow (organisational skills)and employing different linguistic devices from those used in the original text.

It is exactly those differences in style that you need to focus on and either elicit them from the students or point them out to them so that they can use them in an appropriate way in their article.

I am supplying a sample here which I wrote for my students. I would make sure I won’t give away any of this before the students have tried their hand at the task. You will see some of the devices used highlighted.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XC3d5IpvSHk8oNtpdqCSx1oWDIRFHLu5/view?usp=sharing

 

Conclusion: writing can be less of a bore for students if we, teachers, only tried harder.

Noun adjuncts in English and their rendition in Greek

It is amazing how long you may have been teaching and yet not fully identified the difficulties your students may come up against. There was a time when linguists invested far more time in comparing English to other languages and looking into systematic differences that inhibited understanding.

It is my feeling that there are quite a few aspects of the English language posing problems for speakers not just of one first language but of several which remain largely unexplored. At least I gather this much from discussions with other teachers, many of whom overlook these areas of difficulty in their teaching, and the same goes for the majority of course books whether they are meant for an international market or for speakers of a specific language.

 I will focus on one such aspect in this post without any pretensions to thoroughness; this would entail large-scale research with the participation of keen teachers and collection of corpora. However, I will attempt a certain methodology for this suggested research.

My topic is noun adjuncts, which means nouns qualifying nouns. Some simple examples would be:

orange juice, coffee pot, wine glass, health authorities, drug addiction, guard rail

 and many others. The above-mentioned examples are simple in the sense that there is only one noun qualifying another. However, there could be more:

landmark compensation case, snail shell spiral

or the attributive noun could be qualified by an adjective:

social media star, post-traumatic stress disorder

Being a native speaker of Greek, I will put forward my theory of rendition of phrases made up of two nouns to begin with. To my mind there are three different ways in which these phrases can be rendered in Greek:

·       second noun – first noun in genitive case (Most may in fact fall under this category.)

orange juice, wine glass

·       first noun translated as adjective – second as noun

health authorities, giant meteorite

·       second noun preposition (mostly “for”) second noun

drug addiction, air supremacy, kitchen towel, safety net

 

Strange Spring

They say that in times of hardship we all retreat to what is familiar under the illusion that we are protected. I resort to writing in my mother tongue in an effort to make sense of what would hardly be meaningful to us if we had been told a couple of months ago.

Here is my brainchild amidst the coronavirus crisis.

Η παράξενη Άνοιξη

Και ήρθε εκείνη τη χρονιά

Ο χειμώνας μέσα στην άνοιξη

Μάταια πάσχιζαν τα πουλιά

Τον άηχο κόσμο απ’ τη λήθη να βγάλουν

Και οι σκύλοι μας παράμερα κάθονταν

Αποκαμωμένοι από τη σιωπή

Τη σιωπή που γαλήνη δεν έφερνε

Μόνο κι άλλη σιωπή

Και η βροχή – μια βροχή θολή

Με αστέρια διωγμένα

Έπεφτε γύρω μας

Σα να ήθελε με μας ένα να γίνει

Κι όλοι σκέφτονταν σκέψεις

Που οδύνη γεννούσαν κι απόγνωση

Κι αιωρούμασταν – κόκκοι άμμου

Στη δίνη του χώρου και χρόνου

Teaching in the age of the coronavirus or The cloud that saved us from the bug

I am writing this in the days of the coronavirus or Covid-19 so I would like to share some of my teaching experience with anyone out there who would lend an attentive ear.

I have been teaching mostly in a real classroom with only the odd online class with a few adults, and I intend to continue this way when the crisis is over. But right now, I am having all my classes online, (I am using Skype) and this is no easy task especially with young children. However, as my ancestors would say “Ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού” or every cloud has a silver lining.

To begin with, as a teacher I am obliged to find novel ways of adjusting to the medium, and though I feel stretched, I am gradually rising to the challenge. How? It is in large part improvising so that I can maintain the children’s interest and make up for the real contact. In a real classroom, I used realia but to a limited extent whereas online I am making the most of the fact that the children are at home and I can ask them, for example, to play hide-and-seek, where the children hide and ask the rest of us about their whereabouts in the house using and practising  Present Continuous and prepositions of place as well as vocabulary related to rooms and furniture.

Where am I hiding?

Are you hiding under the bed/in the wardrobe/behind the door?

This not only provides good practice but gets the kids to move about as this –lack of exercise-- is one of the problems of a prolonged quarantine.

Thanks to the features of different platforms, we can share sound and screens so we can still use our course books and practise all four skills, but the exciting part of it is that I am looking for material readily available to the students and me for that matter. Let me be more specific: you may wish to overlook some of the material in the course book, at least for the time being, and focus on word groups such as cutlery, food, fixtures in the house or as the fancy takes you. You could ask the students to look out of their window and describe their garden or street or whatever the case might be. It can turn into a guessing game when the surroundings of different students are unfamiliar to the rest. in a nutshell, take advantage of all the new opportunities presenting themselves.

I will now move to another important issue facing parents and children these days: the trauma of seeing parents and grandparents falling ill or even passing away or the trauma of being confined in their homes with no contact with the outside world. There is not enough we can do about the former but perhaps we can intervene so as to reduce their boredom and bring hope to them in the guise of a poem or a story. Let us not forget that art can be liberating and a great healer. Children need reassurance that this nightmare will come to an end and, as a friend, says we shall overcome.

So I wrote a story for my young students called The Cloud that Saved Us from the Bug, in which a young girl with the help of a cloud embarks on a long journey to a faraway corner of the universe, the pool of wishes and dreams, to lodge her wish written on a wax tablet with a stylus. (In ancient Greece it was a medium of writing)

As my intention was not to offer a ready-made story but to stimulate my students’ imagination and activate them by casting them as the heroes who will rescue us all,  I also prepared a slideshow where I provide some cues on each slide meant to encourage them to think of a story of their own before they can watch or read my story.

Here is the story:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gjVBX4K40s3m19T_mVgi0gAJoVit7z6k/view?usp=sharing

And here is the slideshow:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XFJAIeL5Ud8ROOiXxc7GskKiojlpDl8w

Wishing you all the best. Hope we come out of this unscathed or at least with a few minor injuries.

In Topsy Turvy Land: doubting "reality"

A poem that would capture your students’ imagination is Topsy-Turvy Land by H. E. Wilkinson. It would be appropriate for elementary to low-intermediate level.

Children love paradoxes; adults, if put up to it, do too. What if things were exactly the opposite of how they stand now? What if the sky was in the place of earth? (We would look down rather than up) What if the law of gravity pushed us up rather than down? (It would be the law of lightness) What if our eyes were at the back of our head? (Would we walk backwards?)

Questioning the status quo is the way forward; challenging the norm is progress.

So you could introduce the poem by inviting your students to ask what if questions. In a topsy-turvy world anything is possible.

To stimulate your students’ interest and develop their creativity, show the following slide show of the poem in images and ask them to supply the line of the poem that the image suggests.

It is best to provide the last line of each verse which is almost invariably the same.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RbCsz9BAPCW8BRcvoJUCuC6fgLhmqvMN/view?usp=sharing

When this is done, you can show them the slide show with both images and words and get them to compare their version of the poem with the actual poem.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RbCsz9BAPCW8BRcvoJUCuC6fgLhmqvMN/view?usp=sharing

Winter is the season of mystery and darkness, of battling with the elements for survival, of no time for romance.

The following is a poem I wrote a few winters ago:

Love and the Elements

A sneaking darkness folded

 Trees and buildings alike

A flight of birds

Ruffled the night sky

Some flickering stars

Played hide-and-seek

The sea lashed mercilessly

Flailed with a limitless freedom

Some snowflakes danced

The last dance of their life

The howling wind

In hot pursuit

And you stood there

Out of the gaping window

With a torrent of blackness

Down your back

I loved you then

Like never before

But the elements knew

How futile love was

Teaching as a process and ... reality shows

Teaching is a process and not necessarily a controlled one – quite the opposite, I would say. A great deal depends on the response(s) of the students to what is an intended teaching point. Their understanding of it will allow the teacher to move on to the next step. On the other hand, difficulty in comprehension could mean either that the teacher has to expand this particular step in the process or even that it should be deferred to the future, when the students will be more mature and ready to assimilate the new item.

Rather than following a series of steps suggested in a course book, particularly at a more advanced level, I prefer to design a process myself taking into consideration my students’ knowledge and needs. In this manner, I manage to cut out activities which are pointless because my students have already consolidated their knowledge of those particular items.

On the other hand, in a lesson plan of my own I have the opportunity to fit in material-- exercises or vocabulary-boosting activities -- which will be more relevant to my students. What is more, I can variegate the process rather than follow a routine, which is the rule in course books. The result is a convoluted venture which is, however, well worth undertaking.

I will illustrate.

·       Topic: reality shows

·       Warm-up questions (source: COMPLETE CAE Student’s Book page 77)

What do you think about reality shows in general? Choose one of these statements:

a.    “I don’t watch them but I don’t have any moral objections to them.”

b.   “I watch them and I don’t have any moral objections to them.”

c.    “I don’t watch them because I am worried by the ethics of some shows.”

d.   “I watch them but the ethics of some shows worry me.”

e.    “I don’t know/don’t care.”

·       Show video on BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50148299

·       Hand out the news story about Nicole Prince, the Australian reality TV star who won a landmark compensation case for being harassed.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xEbOLIXONVQBDUkWdOVY2iDIfiiYdJsm

·       I have created a derivatives exercise for my students and a few transformations which the students are supposed to do without looking at the text after they have finished reading it and completed the gaps with the right form of the words in capitals.

·       The first transformation brings to the students’ attention a structure which they don’t normally find in advanced grammars as there is so much you can categorise and include in a grammar. This is: Something is yet to + passive infinitive

You can follow this up with more practice:

They have not confirmed the date yet.

The date

We haven’t determined the extent of the damage yet.

The extent of the damage

They haven’t signed the contract yet.

The contract

·       The vocabulary exercise provides plenty of practice on the new vocabulary. I always include lexical items which I have already taught in the past but need to reinforce.

·       Finally, the derivatives exercise brought to mind an excellent semantic questionnaire by Mario Rinvolucri and Paul Davis in their resource book More Grammar Games.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bKxVyTyA6mIYREu-ejlovzv3xT0f2aa/view?usp=sharing

The end result is a much more stimulating and enriching experience for the students.